Thursday, April 16, 2009

… because I was still wrangling the taxes! Got the e-file in at about 3:30 pm, too late to go up to Providence as I had something at home at 6.

It was a good turnout, considering how blue a state Rhode Island is.

There's some pretty fair coverage of the local event at the Providence Journal: Stimulated to protest. The video in that story is better here. There's even a slideshow. This is better coverage than the NY or Boston papers gave to events in their cities.

Doing a little channel-hopping around the networks, between CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, to see what the coverage would be like, I found the bias so blatant it was shocking. (Oh, yes, "I'm shocked, shocked, to find bias going on here.")

One of the (many) things that bugs me about today's lefties is their faux naiveté, or you might say disingenuousness. They pretend that they don't know what you're talking about, seize on some little turn of phrase, and proceed to argue against that, as if it were really the main point. That they continue to use this tactic shows that they are arguing in bad faith. And the obscenities, and the flood-the-zone. These so-called reporters are acting like comment trolls.

This CNN newsbabe, Susan Roesgen, in particular is exemplary, but really, the teabagging jokes are enough to demonstrate that the media elites are, uh, in the bag for the administration. Malkin writes on this effort by the no-longer-remotely-respectable media to turn this dissent into a dirty joke. This is rank stuff. Anderson Cooper and the rest who used this term, teabagging, in the sex-play sense have disgraced their networks. This is not sophisticated wit, it's Beavis and Butthead, snickering. No thought was taken for the many, a majority, I'd guess, who had never heard of this practice. I feel a little dirtier now, and I was a fairly dirty old man already. To Cooper, Shuster, the rest of the tv talkers who commented in this vein, I say, don't be doing blue comedy on the news, or, "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" Ed Driscoll has a roundup post on early coverage, with more than I really wanted to read on the obscenities, and a link to a Nazi comparison.

Update: Speaking of disgusting lefties, here's an example: Teabag Fox News dot com. (I don't want to link this thing.) I was looking for the Janeane Garofolo clip as an example of fluorescent idiocy: here it is, posted proudly, along with much else that should be marked as not for the young or easily squicked.

More: Ed Driscoll has Jon Stewart taking a Cody Willard quote out of context. (It's dangerous to use terms, in this case "fascism," that have a real meaning known to some, and are used by others as invective.) Driscoll links to Stephen Green, who shows how the "teabag" shtick comes straight out of the Alinsky rulebook. In a comment on Green's piece, CraigZ clarifies the point that Jon Stewart used to make trouble for Cody Willard:

Calling Obama a Fascist is NOT to compare him to Hitler. It is an honest question whether the economic, repeat economic policies of this Administration are similar to those pursued by Italy in the 1920s and Germany in the ’30s. The “firing” of the CEO of GM seemed too similar for my tastes to the relationship between Krupp and the German government of 1938.

Though CraigZ is talking about something else, the general point applies. Did I take this quote out of context? Unlike viewers of The Daily Show, the reader here can click the link and decide for him- or herself.

Another update: To end, for now, on a more pleasant note, C-Span has a collection of Tea Party "videos submitted by C-SPAN viewers from across the nation," 14 in all, each from a different place.

Added: Why the tea parties? Why so suddenly? That "Taxed Enough Already" retronym is unfortunate, as it's allowing critics to say things about current taxes and tax breaks. I think the reason that hundreds of tea parties took place last week is that the significance of thisis being noticed by more people. The taxes that the tea partiers are complaining about are not necessarily the current taxes, but the taxes that will be required to meet the budgets that Pelosi, Obama, and Reid have promised. Especially since tax revenue is dropping like a stone. Democrats appear to believe the Laffer Curve is a figment of the imagination, so their prescription will be to raise the rates on the "rich," which will lead to revenue falling further, and so on. You've seen it over and over with municipal transit: when there are too few fare-paying riders to pay the cost of drivers, fuel, maintenance on the equipment, the authority will raise the fare. Except on the ever-increasing number of those who have bus passes. Compare Ari Fleischer: Everyone Should Pay Income Taxes.